Starting today, I’ll be taking nominations for the greatest fantasy football league in the Bay Area. I’ve included my subjective list of what makes a fantasy football team great below. (Readers can add their own criteria in the comments.) If this starts to sound like your fantasy team, address whatever weird bylaws in your league charter involving speaking to a member of the press, and send an e-mail to phartlaub@sfchronicle.com.

Write two or three paragraphs about your league, and let me know when and where your draft is scheduled. Use the subject line “Greatest Fantasy Team.” Deadline is this Friday. I have a tentative agreement with my editor to profile the winning fantasy team or teams in the Chronicle in early September.

What I look for in a fantasy football league:

Nerdiness: When I wrote the headline “Searching for the Bay Area’s greatest fantasy football league,” I really meant “dorkiest fantasy football league.” That doesn’t mean I plan to make fun of you. I would much rather hang out with people in a nerdy fantasy football league with a bunch of offbeat characters and weird traditions, than a boring one where the owners take everything seriously.

A live draft: I’m in a fantasy baseball league with an online draft, and it’s fine. Several Chronicle reporters are owners, so we can mock each other at work. But I’ll always prefer a live draft. Would you teleconference people in to your wedding?

I could try for 100 years, and never take a better meat porn photo.

Meat: I’d love to be wrong about this. I suppose it’s theoretically possible there’s a good vegan fantasy football league somewhere in America. But I just can’t imagine a successful draft without piles and piles of grilled animal flesh on a card table that has not been factory tested to support the weight.

Levity: I hate leagues where owners take things way too seriously, when large amounts of money get involved and when too much time is spent arguing in a serious way. It gets less fun for me when people can’t differentiate between being a fake general manager and a real one. As you’re reminded in almost every magazine, web site and blog related to the pastime, this is fantasy.

Weird traditions: I’m not sure who decided that each owner in our fantasy football league has to do a shot of bacon and jalapeno-infused vodka after the first and eighth rounds of the draft. But that happens. We also take turns each week doing power rankings. There’s a double blind draft where children pull names and numbers out of hats to determine the draft order, which is posted on YouTube. And poetry occasionally breaks out — please watch Justin Berton choose Michael Vick with the first overall pick two years ago.

Owners who don’t know what they’re doing: Fantasy football is like paintball and Pictionary. It becomes progressively less fun when everyone is an expert at it. Everyone in my league has at least one incompetent tic. (The guy who drafts too many players from his alma mater; the guy who drafts in 2013 as if it’s 2011; the guy who drafts a kicking in the 9th round.)

A really ugly trophy that everyone covets: We have a trophy (see it above in my 2012 acceptance speech) that is way too large and cheaply made, that is still treated like something Indiana Jones might seek in one of his movies. My house was burglarized last month. After sharing this news on Twitter in real time, multiple members of my fantasy football league inquired about the safety of the trophy.

Among the dorky traditions is “trophy modification rule” that allows the current winner to alter the trophy in any way possible, as long as the names are still visible. It now has a light function.

Elements of humiliation: I need to use this space to apologize one more time to Ben Alamar and Oscar Villalon, who I publicly ridiculed for taking Roddy White in the first round and Owen Daniels in the fifth last year … before they won our league. Ben is a sports analytics consultant who worked for the Oklahoma City Thunder when they drafted James Harden and Russell Westbrook.

( He’s offered a free copy of his new book, “Sports Analytics: A Guide for Coaches, Managers, and Other Decision Makers,” available on Amazon.com, to whatever league is chosen as the Bay Area’s best. Ben is appearing with Villalon at 7 p.m. next Tuesday, Aug. 20, at Booksmith in San Francisco. More details here.)

Please add your categories in the comments. And nominate your fantasy football league to phartlaub@sfchronicle.com.

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder/editor of The Big Event. He takes requests. Contact him at phartlaub@sfchronicle.com. Follow him on Twitter @peterhartlaub. Follow The Big Event on Facebook.